Denny Zeitlin: Odyssey

"Don't count stars or you might stumble," the lyric warns. The song is about falling in love, but Denny Zeitlin zooms in on the cosmos at the outset of his live journey into "It Could Happen to You" on Odyssey. He flashes around the piano's twinkling top end with whole-tone swirls and crystalline dissonances, like Tinkerbell or maybe a firefly, with drummer George Marsh at his side, articulating icy stick figures on the ride cymbal, while bassist Mel Graves stays low to the ground, droning intermittently, as if to emphasize the dangerously wide pitch expanse between them. After about a minute and a half, they float down into the old familiar tune, landing softly. The effect is magical, worth gazing up at, even while preparing to negotiate a metric terrain that shifts between sevens and fours, which, for safety, would be expected to call for a certain amount of counting.

The liberating thing is that well-seasoned artists like Zeitlin and his bandmates (who first met in the 1960s) know songs like this one from Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen inside out. You can bet they have played it so many times that they can feel it in their bones, the form, the harmonies, the phrasing, the lyric, the ethos. It is a story they have told and heard thousands of times, that they have loved for a long time.

This kind of understanding can make for a powerful and exciting performance, as it does here. No need for walking on eggshells, just digging in, picking up where they left off, leaning into the corners, plumbing the depths, flying into the wind on a straightaway, standing up on the wings. After a six-minute exploration of this beloved old text, the music disappears in a puff, evaporating back into the ether, leaving the audience at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts Theatre to erupt in a wave of warm applause and, you might suppose, grateful recognition. "Yeah," is the last word.